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It's funny how people in these forums start to moan and complain about things that are only in their own heads.

According to this post ubuntu touch *does not use bionic*, it uses libhybris which allows the use of android drivers with glibc.

So ubuntu touch is not that much of android, but not that much of GNU either, it is its own thing. With regard to the push for SurfaceFlinger on the desktop, we will have to wait and see. But the desktop and touch interfaces will most probably remain very different beasts for quite some time. Since X is all the desktop blobs support right now.

Before moaning about whatever display server canonical might be pushing, remember this one thing: *it must be supported by the blobs*. The only GPU more or less well supported by open drivers is intel's. All the other ARM SoCs or desktop GPUs require blobs, end of story. Consumers mostly buy notebooks, which should not melt when ubuntu is installed.

Either ubuntu gets big enough so that canonical can convince GPU makers to write drivers for their own display server, or they are bound to use the display servers (or a fork thereof) that is already supported by GPU makers.

That said, I do believe it would be easier to convince AMD/nVidia to support SurfaceFlinger than to convince *everyone* to support wayland (how are they so much different anyway?). If someone else does that or manages to write good open drivers for every GPU under the sun, then I'm sure canonical would reconsider.

But the Wayland protocol doesn't care about drivers. It's a protocol, that all the major toolkits have started to port to. This isn't Xorg, with user space drivers. Weston currently can run in an x server, under video cards that support KMS and DRM, or under a Framebuffer. Drivers aren't the issue. A developer even got Weston to run on Android a while back. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnrYxEMXF6g

From my understanding the basic ideas SurfaceFlinger uses similar ideas to Wayland, but it uses different APIs, and I don't know how much the protocol SurfaceFlinger would allow expansion for adding desktop things to its protocol.

Because Ubuntu is pushing Android's SurfaceFlinger, unless they add support for the Wayland protocol into SurfaceFlinger somehow, supporting both protocols, they could be causing fragmentation, because everyone else is porting to the Wayland protocol.

The last thing I want is to see a webpage offering users a downloadable package that says "Download Application XYZ for a) X, b) Wayland, c) SurfaceFlinger".

I doubt this is needed. Apparently apps(their toolkits basically) can be made to choose an appropriate backend for either Wayland or X at runtime. So I don't see a reason why this can't happen with SurfaceFlinger as well.
Still, I'd rather Wayland to dominate, I believe it will be better. Time will tell.

***************************

Also, I read in previous post(s) something along the lines that apps needing to be ported to a new display server is as much of an issue for SurcaFlinger as it is for Wayland. This is not true(except for the fact that the most important toolkits are already bettering Wayland support), since XWayland already exists. While barely usable now, it should be much better soon. Heck, I've watched youtube videos on FireFox running on top of XWayland, running on top of Weston, running on top of Wayland, running on top of X, running on top of Catalyst driver(!!!).
It went fairly well actually.
More things than people think are apparently possible. Basically Wayland can even be run on top of proprietary drivers as of now, but in a "crude" and far from ideal way..

How much do it differ from regular android besides the frontend, according to the article it sounds like it basically cyanogenmod. What is the advantage over regular android. Is the sound system also android?

But the Wayland protocol doesn't care about drivers. It's a protocol, that all the major toolkits have started to port to. This isn't Xorg, with user space drivers. Weston currently can run in an x server, under video cards that support KMS and DRM, or under a Framebuffer. Drivers aren't the issue. A developer even got Weston to run on Android a while back. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnrYxEMXF6g

From my understanding the basic ideas SurfaceFlinger uses similar ideas to Wayland, but it uses different APIs, and I don't know how much the protocol SurfaceFlinger would allow expansion for adding desktop things to its protocol.

Because Ubuntu is pushing Android's SurfaceFlinger, unless they add support for the Wayland protocol into SurfaceFlinger somehow, supporting both protocols, they could be causing fragmentation, because everyone else is porting to the Wayland protocol.

I am no expert, so feel free to correct me, but doesn't wayland require KMS and DRM, which the blobs lack? So wouldn't the blobs need to implement said features in order to support the wayland protocol? Wouldn't the SoC's libs have to include support for the wayland protocol?

AFAIK wayland is only usable right now with open drivers, which kinda makes sense since this is an Intel project afterall, and Intel is the only one truly supporting open drivers.

It may be fine for geeky distros such as arch and gentoo to impose such limitations on users, but if a distro is to be mainstream, it *must* simply work.

Also, maybe canonical is planning on including something on the lines of XWayland onto SurfaceFlinger, to be able to run X applications on top of it. I guess we can only wait and see.

I am no expert, so feel free to correct me, but doesn't wayland require KMS and DRM, which the blobs lack? So wouldn't the blobs need to implement said features in order to support the wayland protocol? Wouldn't the SoC's libs have to include support for the wayland protocol?

AFAIK wayland is only usable right now with open drivers, which kinda makes sense since this is an Intel project afterall, and Intel is the only one truly supporting open drivers.

It may be fine for geeky distros such as arch and gentoo to impose such limitations on users, but if a distro is to be mainstream, it *must* simply work.

I think it already exist closed source driver for wayland for the raspberryPi?

I am no expert, so feel free to correct me, but doesn't wayland require KMS and DRM, which the blobs lack? So wouldn't the blobs need to implement said features in order to support the wayland protocol? Wouldn't the SoC's libs have to include support for the wayland protocol?

I can tell you that Wayland doesn't require KMS, but Weston does(not sure if Weston truly NEEDS it to run though).